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A Foolproof Valentine’s Day Gift Guide

Usually the question comes around the third week of January, when an iCal event gets entered perilously close to February 14, and all of a sudden—ding! A spark! And a pang—the hope of a grand romantic gesture and the guilt of knowing we might not recognize one if we saw it. It’s a day when disappointment is typically directly proportionate to expectation. We’re disappointed because we expect too much; we’re disappointed because we don’t know what to expect. It’s Valentine’s Day.

And it’s not you. Well, it is a little, sometimes. Because you don’t know what we want. But that’s mostly because we don’t, either. That’s not usually true—generally, in life, we know, deeply, what we want. Usually, that goes for gifts, too—you remember how achingly and unsubtly we campaigned for those Christmas presents? We’re not shy there.

But Valentine’s Day is something else. Mostly because it queues up so many selves, and at this one holiday (if that’s really what it is), they’re all at cross-purposes. There’s the childish, selfish, hunter-gatherer brain that endless wants, and immediately sets about thinking how much we can extract from how many people, pegging some for Repossi and some for a mini box of candy hearts (as foul as they are, better than nothing). There’s the more modest superego that’s always turning down drinks, the one that suggests a quiet evening in with a bottle of champagne only a little more expensive than your usual. Those aspiring to Gone Girl–style cool-girl status suggest beer and sliders instead. That semi-dormant Disney princess self, mostly untapped since elementary school, surfaces only long enough to whisper that maybe this is it—this could be the most important, romantic, glittery night of your life! But it very well could also not be.

So when we say, “This Is What You Really Want for Valentine’s Day,” we’re almost just as surprised as you. Not because they’re surprising picks—in fact, there’s a relieving sense of familiarity about them. They’re all things you’re already familiar with, that already belong on the arm of stable, handsomely appointed women everywhere. It’s just like reading a short, moving poem and thinking, “I knew all those words—why did I think to put them all together like that?” They’re gifts that are classic, even ubiquitous, that are in a small (but incredibly relieving) capacity, impersonal.

We would all be glad to have anything on here, in almost any order. They’re things we already want. And once you shift over into expecting something lovely, timeless, and generally desirable, it releases that emotional anvil that hangs over the day. These aren’t marriage proposals, they’re not our-new-life-starts-today markers. They’re beautiful things on a beautiful day. It’s as easy, as weightless, and as delightful as that.